Noah’s Compass by Anne Tyler: review

Noah’s Compass, a tale of amnesia, reminds Caroline Moore of just why
she enjoys Anne Tyler
so much

By Caroline Moore

5:42AM BST 09 Aug 2009

Noah’s Compass is a novel about a man with amnesia. Generally, Elmore Leonard is right about amnesia in fiction: 'it’s what you do when you don’t have an idea; you give the main character amnesia and watch him f--- up’. But if anyone can reanimate a stale plot device it will be Anne Tyler. Hers is a fine-grained art, whose comedy could easily coarsen into the self-consciously quirky. If it does not, this is because her surprises are rooted in character: it is human nature that she evidently finds infinitely fascinating and surprising, with its constantly unforeseeable capacity for change.

The possibility of change offers hope, which could easily tilt Tyler’s novels into saccharine solutions. But it can also open vistas of bleak instability and one is never sure which will predominate in her subtly nuanced fiction.

The opening of Noah’s Compass introduces us to a man in a state of transition. 'In the sixty-first year of his life, Liam Pennywell lost his job.’ The job was not one he wanted: he had been 'teaching fifth grade in a second-rate private boys’ school’. Will this prove a new beginning?

He has lost 'dusty scuffed corridors’, 'interminable after-school meetings’ and 'reams of niggling paperwork’, and hopes this will be 'just the nudge he needed to push him to the next stage’.His vision of the 'next stage’, however, is an uninspiring prospect: 'the summing-up stage. The stage where he sat in his rocking chair and reflected on what it all meant, in the end.’ Liam is a character who, like many others in Tyler’s fiction, feels out of kilter, uncentred: 'It’s as if I’ve never been entirely present in my own life.’ He is defined by absences: he is widowed, and divorced. His three daughters roll their eyes over his shortcomings and call him 'Mr Magoo’. He is a 'low-key pedant, avoiding confrontation, sliding out of arguments’.

His new life, as he sees it, is to be a spiritual as well as a physical downsizing. The novel opens with Liam moving into a small, cheerless, modern apartment. By the end of the first chapter, he is in hospital. He has been hit on the head, but cannot remember what happened. This small hiatus in his memory, dismissed as minor by those around him, begins to obsess Liam. Visiting a neurologist, he meets Eunice, who is acting as a 'hired rememberer’ to an ageing millionaire. The concept intrigues Liam, and they strike up a relationship. Despite (or perhaps because of) her dowdy appearance – oversized, finger-marked spectacles sliding down a shiny nose, voluminous ethnic-print skirts, errant bra straps, sandals like dugout canoes – Tyler enjoys the catalogues of Eunice’s 'unfortunate fashion statements’; though Eunice, too, will have her chance to surprise us.

Noah’s Compass is immensely readable. It displays many of Tyler’s finest qualities: her sharp observation of humanity, her wry comedy; the luminous accuracy of her descriptions. If the novel disappoints, lacking some of the energy and sparkle of Tyler’s other novels, this is perhaps because of its central character. Liam is a 'puddle of a man’: even his melancholy lacks depth. Though the need for change is, more overtly than usual, the subject of this book, Liam’s capacity for self reinvention is dispiritingly limited.

Noah, of course, had no compass, because 'he wasn’t going anywhere’, as Liam tells his grandson. 'There was nowhere to go. He was just trying to stay afloat.’ A triter novelist would have shown how Liam found his compass, a new direction for his future, by revisiting his memories of the past. Tyler avoids this overtly sentimental resolution, but at a cost. The novel remains, like Liam’s life, somewhat static and disheartening. But even in this minor key, a novel by Anne Tyler is cause for celebration.